


Made For Him/Her

by Hikario



Category: Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:29:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1636520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hikario/pseuds/Hikario
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the last moment of life, Crake muses about the people he very intentionally left behind, and why they came to be there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Made For Him/Her

**Author's Note:**

> Written for fatedaddiction

 

 

A/N: I pondered long and hard on just what to write for you. I thought, again and again as I wrote, that this might not be what you wanted. I worried. Again and again, however, I came to the conclusion that this was the only way, or at least the best I could imagine, to truly give a new perspective on Oryx and Snowman (especially Oryx) without sacrificing Margaret Atwood's delicious ambiance (or at least my best imitation). You made no mention of Crake, however his eyes were the most convenient window for me to use. As a narrator, he alone saw unrevealed sides of both Oryx and Snowman.

I hope you enjoy.

\-- \--- \--

It's curious, I feel myself muse without permission, what emerges from our brains as we die. The mind may be sharpened to a fine and tempered blade, polished clean of detritus that could unbalance or dull it. But the brain, the pathetic brain, our failed inordinately wasteful hard drive and processor both, is so garbled with excess that in a moment of weakness, such as death, even the purest mind, Mine, is not isolated from it's ignorance.

I realize my feelings are wandering, unfettered, and immediately I snap to repress them, but even that reaction is blasphemed with emotion. I've become weak, I realize. It's good that we die now.

"I'm counting on you."

I slit Oryx's throat.

It's absolute bullshit, scientifically, that we can see our whole life flash before our eyes at the moment of death. None the less, I do.

\---

I decided that I loved Jimmy more than I loved being alive. The day this occurred to me, I spent the evening developing an enzyme to inhibit neurological growth between the identifying memory centers of the brain and the emotional uplinks in the hippocampus. No sane creature, which I sought to create, should be able to value one specific being above even their specie's survival.

That was the day I decided, firmly, that it had to be Jimmy. I had long known it could not be me, and I suspect that even in my earliest days of planning, the messiah who I envisioned rechristening humanity was in my prospections a silhouette of my friend. The job was made for him, as much as he was perfect for the job.

I made the job perfect for him.

Bringing Jimmy in was easy. Invent a job, find a purpose, make an infinitesimal dent in my infinite budget. He's wasn't stupid enough to think I needed him for his training, his skills. He might have been stupid enough to think I didn't really need him at all. He was certainly too stupid to know that he was the last stage of my plan, my nightmare waking dream. I liked it that way. It allowed me to enjoy his friendship, and him to enjoy himself any which way he wanted.

I hadn't always planned for Oryx, the way Jimmy existed from the beginning. She became the catalyst that gave me permission, ability to realize the last stage of my planning, making it real and possible. I was firm and clear until that last step. It was her humanity that upset me, a necessary chaos that I introduced to hand-feed my creations their own endorphins, to train them into a successful life routine. She was necessary to enshrine in my creations some fraction of humanity that was worth saving. 

Her grasp on humanity ruined me inside.

I have never interviewed or auditioned. I have found who and what I needed, and brought it to me. She was an anomaly. I told Jimmy, once, that I asked for a girl to look like the child in his favourite HottTotts screencap, and the girl sent to me was Oryx. I lied. In truth, she came to me of her own accord, without coxing or scouting. I couldn't have found Oryx, and she seemed to know it. Her existence was jarring, like the sudden, obvious emergence of the solution to a puzzle. Sometimes I suspected that she hadn't existed at all before we met, that she materialized out of the sea foam like Aphrodite. It occurred to me, once she had found me, that I would always have needed her to begin the end. She was merely one step ahead. She had a strange knack for that. A last, detestable gasp, perhaps, of obsolete human-invented fate, to trick me into it's faith. 

No. She was unusual, and so I saw her. The fact that she found me, and I needed her was chance. Even now I will not let my mind be deluded by mythos.

I couldn't admit that she was outside my control. I could never admit that she had a power I didn't, even over me. Jimmy would know I loved her. He would never, never know that I didn't choose it. I never bothered to look at her history. The open book of her entire life lay in an unopened file on my desktop. As much as anyone needed to know, she was the child in Jimmy's photo, and that fact became as important to me as it was to Jimmy. I didn't care if it wasn't true.

Actually, I was afraid it would be.

She had an alluring aura about her, as if to intentionally weaken a man. She was loyal, faultlessly loyal, and yet she was a terrible force in her conviction. It had crossed my mind that how she appeared to me was perhaps how I appeared to Jimmy; blindingly brilliant, existing on a level that was impossible for one to climb to match. When I told her, directly, some taste of my plans, a whisper that bluntly confirmed destruction, death, the deaths of many, the deaths of us, she did not flinch. She frowned, sweetly, gently, inquisitively, and asked me to explain how this would make the world better. I did. She understood.

I fell in love with her then. She wasn't just my second in command, my ambassador, she was my lover, my friend. She was a whore. We both knew that. But she was still my lover. The sex was real, if nothing else. Sex had always been real, but never the kind of real she could create. Sex with her felt like you were loved and cherished. At the same time she would be your lover who pleasured you, your mother who comforted you, your child who you wanted to cling to and horde all for yourself.

I revelled in taking her. So close to the end, she was able to access more of me than any other (except Jimmy). More than the half-falsities of my outward emotion, more pure then anyone (other then Jimmy) had ever encountered. She was my gift to him, and I prided myself in letting him take her from me

I hated Jimmy, for just a moment, when he first met her. He grasped her hand, forced gentleness atop unbridled, childlike excitement, all under a well polished professional mask of the joker. "She's mine, mine, you cork-nut, you asshole, you bastard!" I had wanted to scream, from somewhere deep inside. 

My hate was emotion. I couldn't quite gather the cognisance to suppress it. It's so close to love, which was and is now my last permissible vice.

Instead I smugly revelled in her adoration, more obvious and preening than I needed to be for Jimmy to catch on. I had almost forgotten what it was like to sit next to someone with a valid claim to know me. My controlled show of manipulative emotions, for the benefit of the borderline Asperger's and anti-social behavioural staff of Paradise would seem to be pantomime and melodrama to Jimmy. Jimmy who knew me.

I watched him squirm in his seat as Oryx lavished me with her words. In a sentence she could defy me, ally with Jimmy, and make me divine. Jimmy was dying with desire and hopelessness. I was (am) deeply satisfied in my hate and love. The last key clicked into place.

Oryx would be my finest tool. The last woman on Earth. Metaphorical Eve for a reverse-fall to Eden. The last link would be this woman. The last-first would be Jimmy.

\---

I want to see wildness in his eyes as he shoots me dead. I'm beyond reason now, bleeding out resolve as Oryx bleeds out in my arms. I won't need it. My face is a mask for Jimmy, with all the instructions of Revelation written across it. All the pain and fire of cleansing--

I want to see in his eyes what he feels for her, what I feel for him, a last gasp of humanity as he wipes the last of us away on my blatant command.

And damn it, I love him just as much as, more than I could-would ever love her.

They were made for each other.

I made them for each other.

They-- 

 


End file.
